The Organ Family

3 Months Old

As I mentioned in the previous post, Mike and I have been in the process of taking McKinley's 3 month pictures. Notice I used the word "process". Due to the very short attention span of a 3 month old, the fact that there are really only two times a day that light is great for outdoor pictures, and the best smiles come when Daddy gets home from work, it took us about a week to get all the shots we wanted. Then it took another couple of weeks for me to sift through the plethora of pictures (1,174 to be exact) and edit the chosen images.

Being that this didn't sound like a walk in the park, you are probably wondering why we decided to take on this task? The truth is we are CHEAP! After doing research, I found that most photographers only allot an hour of time for each photo session. Knowing how uncooperative McKinley can be when she is either hungry or tired (which for a 3 month old is the majority of the time), we just decided not to take the chance of paying a ton of money for mediocre results. I think we made a very wise decision because our very first try at outdoor pictures resulted in zero pictures and me in tears. We tried our hand at McKinley's newborn pictures here and we were happy with the outcome, so we decided to try the her 3 month pictures. I am planning on posting all the edited pictures on Facebook, but here are some of our favorites....enjoy:)

Cry Baby

Mike and I are in the process of taking McKinley's 3 month pictures. Through LOTS of trial & error, we found that we get the best expressions out of McKinley when she sees her Daddy for the first time after he gets home from work. So each evening, Mike calls when he is about 5 minutes from the house, so I can put McKinley in an outfit and get her set up for the photos. Once Mike gets home, I am ready and waiting with the camera to catch M's expressions as he walks around the corner. Surprisingly, it has worked really great so far. Last night however, Martini got a little jealous and started barking. It scared McKinley and this is the sequence of photos that followed:

Cloth Wipes

If you read our blog, you will know that for the last few years Mike and I have tried to live as green and as organically as possible. We recycle, we use cloth bags at the grocery store instead of plastic, we use cloth napkins instead of paper towels, all of our cleaning products are non-toxic and environmentally safe, and even our toiletry products are organic.

Once I found out I was pregnant I knew that I wanted to try to do the same thing with our little one. We researched and picked a Pediatrician that would support our lifestyle, I chose to breastfeed instead of using formula, and I wanted to use cloth diapers. You can see my post on cloth diapers here.

There is a myriad of reasons we decided to go cloth: Environmentally friendly, cost effective, better for baby. Once I made the decision to use cloth diapers, it never occurred to me to think about what I wanted to use for wipes. I just figured that I was doing great just by using cloth diapers, so throwing away a few wipes each day wasn't a big deal.

When Baby McKinley finally arrived we had to use disposable diapers the first few weeks of her life. It hated watching Mike take a bag of trash out every other day, especially when we are used to setting one bag of trash out each week. Finally the day came when we could start using the cloth diapers. Even though I wasn't necessarily looking forward to doing a little extra laundry, I was just glad that we weren't filling up a trashcan and making emergency runs to the store to get disposable diapers. Besides the cloth diapers a just too cute:)

Thankfully, the cloth diaper routine was easy. After a couple weeks of cloth diapering I started doing research on cloth wipes. It didn't take me long to decide to ditch the disposables. I realized that by using cloth wipes, it wasn't going to add anymore to my work load and it was just one more way to live cleaner & greener for both baby & the environment.

While online I found several sites with instructions on making your own cloth wipes. Most of the cloth wipes are made from fleece and I just happened to have a ton of fleece fabric left over from a sewing project. In an effort to save some money I decided to make our own wipes. I already had the material, now I just needed the time:)

The finished products:

Once I finished sewing the wipes I needed a wipes solution. I found tons of homemade solution recipes online, but I ended up ordering a pre-made solution from Lusa Organics. It is called Baby Wipe Juice and I absolutely LOVE it! It smells so good and it is super concentrated so a little goes a long way. It will take me several months to use up the bottle of solution. I am so impressed with their Baby Wipe Juice, I can't wait to try some of their other products.

Also, the company that I order my cloth diapers from, Jack Be Natural, posted this video that shows how to fold your cloth wipes so when you pull one wipe out of a wipe warmer or bin, the next wipe pops out the top ready to go. It makes the diaper change so much easier.